


Lose Your Mind

by tokillthatmockingbird



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen, and you'll get very frustrated, in which mr. lahey is a dick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-28
Updated: 2014-01-28
Packaged: 2018-01-10 10:10:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1158388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tokillthatmockingbird/pseuds/tokillthatmockingbird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You never realized how many questions could be answered by monosyllables.</p>
<p>Also known as the story of Isaac Lahey's deteriorating relationship with his father.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lose Your Mind

**Author's Note:**

> So this is my first piece of fiction for Teen Wolf and my first AO3 piece. I'm sorry it's in second person. I know that throws a lot of people, but for some reason, it flowed best for me. Hope you like it, and I sincerely hope you don't think I'm crazy after you've read this.

Isaac failed a math test, and you’re pissed.

    It’s not so much that he’s failed but that he’s failed to _tell you_ that he’s failed that really boils your blood. You’ve tried to keep an open line of communication— that’s what the family therapist told you would help— and even when you felt like you were going to drop from exhaustion, you made time in your day to ask Isaac about his, to sit on the edge of his mattress at bedtime and make _damn sure_ that he didn’t carry any questions or concerns into his sleep.

    (And, yeah, you’re also mad about the bad grade, because you know he could do better if he applied himself, but he never does. He just sits in that tree house of his with a sketchbook full of worthless child-scribbles and never thinks once about his education. You’re not exactly pissed because he failed; you’re pissed because he didn’t have to.)

    “I’m not good at math.” He won’t even look you in the eyes when he explains.

    “That’s no excuse.” There were tutors. There were hours in the day that were wasted in the tree house that should be spent with his math book.

    His shoulders sag into a shrug as his hands twitch a pencil across a blank page. You wrench it out of your hands, and he finally meets your eye. “Stop drawing your _fucking_ pictures,” you demand, “and look me in the eye, and tell me why you failed this math test.”

    “Cam used to teach me math.”

    Isaac didn’t talk much, but when he did, his words usually packed a punch that betrayed his size. He was slight, but his ideas could be large. Creative and measured, he had a way of putting together strings of words that could feel like a sucker punch to the gut. It used to blow you away with awe, and now it just pisses you off.

    “You heard the therapist, Ize,” you sigh as you scrub a hand over your face. “You can’t use Cam’s death as an excuse for everything—”

    “You do.”

    The only person who feels a sucker punch in his gut this time is Isaac when you shell it out yourself. You remember how small he is when the force of your physicality throws him across the room where he smashes into a kitchen chair and his legs tangle with its when they clatter to the floor together.

    “G-go to your room,” your voice trembles despite wanting to remain authoritative. The therapist told you to that keeping a place of authority in the house would be helpful for Isaac— structure, let him know that someone else has got everything in control.

    (You had nothing in control.)

 

    His curls grew in wild, and his jaw set in a strong line. Cheekbones high, lashes thick, lips full. He had his father’s demeanor, but he looked just like his mother. At five years old, he’d screw up those dark brows in disgust, like he was sucking on something sour. “I don’t look like Mom!” he’d demand. “Mommy’s a _girl_.”

    As he grew older, he embraced the likeness he shared with her, and while she was wild where he was calm, you always saw her in him. Not just because of those curls and that smile, but because he held curiosity and wonder in his eyes— childlike innocence, yes, but something more, something inherently _thirsty_ and excited.

    You wonder if they still look like that. He doesn’t look at you anymore until you make him, and normally your blood is boiling too hot to focus on more than the throbbing vein in your temple. Then when he whimpers at you, it reminds you of all those times that Erin would do that in her sleep before she died. (She didn’t just _die_. She ran far away where you couldn’t catch her.) It reminds you of all the nights you had to kiss her awake and promise that even if Cam was gone, you were still there, Isaac was still there. It reminds you that in the end, that wasn’t enough for her anymore. You were not enough.

    (He doesn’t look like his mother when his face is covered in bruises.)

 

    You miss him when he’s gone. You’ve numbed yourself to the dull ache you feel when you stare at Camden’s and Erin’s empty seats at the table, but Isaac’s missing presence feels like an icicle stabbing into your heart. It’s cold and sharp, and after someone’s mother drops him off, you corral him back into his seat at the dinner table to see how his day was.

    You stop letting him go out. His friends are welcome to come by to play video games for an hour or so. They can stay the night on the weekend if they’re out early in the morning, but there is no reason for Isaac to be running around the streets of Beacon Hills at the age of thirteen. You watch the news. You know it’s not safe in this damn place.

    You never realized just how irritating preteen boys could be. (Were Camden and his friends this obnoxious?) They’re loud and messy, and since when did kids start getting so _sensitive_? You yell at one child to stop leaving his shoes at the front door, and he runs home to his mom, wailing like you’ve just thrown acid in his face.

    His friends stop coming over. Isaac starts retreating to his room the moment he comes home from school. Even when he comes to the dinner table, he’s not really there. Conversation is heavy and sparse.

You never realized how many questions could be answered by monosyllables.

“Where is Nathan these days?” you ask lightly. The therapist said to show a genuine interest in Isaac’s life, but it wasn’t your fault that his life was so boring. You ask questions, and you wish you care about the answers, but you don’t anymore. (You just want to hear his voice now, low and measured like Camden’s was.)

“He’s busy, I guess.” Isaac doesn’t pick up his head.

“Well, that’s too bad.” What parent could let their thirteen-year-old get _busy_ , you’d never know. You can’t imagine loading Isaac down with activities, with responsibilities that would take him away from you. The therapist said that giving him responsibilities was a good thing, but therapists aren’t always right.

“Dad, I have a-a history project due on Wednesday.” He mumbles when he talks. “It’s a group project, and we’re supposed to get together at Maya’s house on Monday—”

“Isaac, you know the rules.”

“Yeah, but it’s for school.”

“Why can’t everyone come over here instead?”

He physically bites his lips together, but you can see an answer bubbling under them. When he looks at you, his eyes are reproachful. No longer full of wonder but of trepidation. Clearly losing his brother and losing his mother has stolen all that unbridled curiosity from him. You just thank the Lord that you’re still here to help him.

“ _What_ , Isaac?” You’re exasperated. You spend all day begging him to talk, and when he finally has something to say, he holds it in.

“Mrs. McCall says she doesn’t want Stiles and Scott to come over here.” His words are clipped and quiet, and he stops looking at you when he says it and finds a sudden interest in his peas.

You can feel rage bubbling beneath your chest. Who the hell is this McCall woman anyway? What the hell did that mean that she didn’t want the two boys to come to your house? Probably all the goddamn small town gossip about you and Isaac. People think you don’t know it, but you know what they say; that you’ve become utterly unhinged by your wife and your son’s deaths, that you’ve become obsessed with keeping Isaac close to home since it all happened. As far as you were concerned, more parents should be like you, rather than letting their kids run amok in the streets. Keep them safe and alive. Isn’t that the purpose of being a parent? You failed Camden, but you wouldn’t fail Isaac. It would be different this time.

“You can’t go, Isaac,” you tell him evenly though you can still feel the simmering heat of your anger beneath your sternum. “Pass the carrots.”

 

The only reason you hit him is because it gets you _results_. It’s helping him pass tests and keep his room clean, to keep his life in order, to keep him safe. You don’t _enjoy_ having to punish your son; only sick people enjoy that kind of thing. You aren’t sick. You’re just a concerned parent trying to do what’s best for your son.

He bruises easily, and it makes it so much harder to look at him the next day. You don’t hit that hard, just enough to leave a stinging impression, but one clap to the face seems to leave him with purple and black plumes on pal skin that lasts for days,

You make an effort to use words instead of fists, but Isaac doesn’t respond to them as well. You could spend a whole afternoon with a raised voice and reminding him how worthless he would be if he didn’t shape up, but it just made him retreat into small corners of his mind.

You’ve tried raising your voice; you’ve tried being calm. You tried killing with kindness, and you tried throwing out some of the scariest insults you know. You _want_ the lectures to work, but they never do. You try to remember how Erin used to do it, how she would corral her kids with a stern tone and command them with gentleness. But you are not Erin, and that’s precisely why Isaac won’t listen to you.

The way Isaac looks at you after he’s been struck _hurts_ , and it frustrates you. You are not the bad guy, you explain again and again, it wouldn’t be like this if Isaac just did what he was supposed to do. It makes you so _mad_ that he won’t just listen to you; he could make it all stop if he stopped fucking up.

When he cries, it infuriates you, and you can admit that sometimes you lose control. But teenagers aren’t supposed to _cry_ like that (at least you never did), and you can’t stand it when Isaac makes you feel like some sort of _criminal_ when all you’re trying to do is make his life better.

Hitting him normally makes you feel bad, but there comes a point where it doesn’t.

You’re more scared of yourself than Isaac ever could be.

One day, you come to with your hand curled into a fist, knuckles bloody, and part of Isaac’s tooth on the living room floor. You do not remember how you got there or why you had punished him so harshly, but there you are, shaking with the strain of what you had done while Isaac cowers on the floor with his hands protecting his face.

(You’re losing your mind.)

He peeks up at you through trembling, bloodied fingers, brow drawn in terror. He swallows hard, and you have no control when your foot swings out and kicks him hard in the chest. He crumples on the hardwood with a yelp of sound and immediately curls in on himself, practiced, measured movements, like he’s done this so many times before. Long legs tucked to his chest and head burrowed into his knees, Isaac is impossibly small, almost childlike. “You piece of shit,” you growl, not because you want to but because it feels right coming out your lips.

(You’re not _losing_ your mind. You’ve already lost it.)

 

You catch him with a backpack full of soup cans and spare clothes, tying sheets into knots with his window thrown wide open and the screen deposited on the floor by the sill. When you swing open the door, the sheets fall in a bungled heap, and he stumbles into the corner of the room, knocking over his lamp and alarm clock with one swing of his spastic arms.

He jumps at the noise they make as they clatter to the ground and the lamp shatters into pieces. He wraps his arms around his chest and presses himself so hard into the wall that it’s like he’s trying to merge with the wallpaper. Every step closer you take is another inch of himself that he tries to make smaller.

“What are you doing?” you ask conversationally, stooping to pick up the sheets and examine them, hoping that Isaac will give you the honest answer the first time you ask.

He rubs at the black swelling beneath his eye when he says, “N-nothing.”

It is not the truth, but you gave him a chance, which you think is very fair of you.

“Really? Because it looks like you’re trying to run away.”

(Like mother, like son.)

“I-I’m not.”

“Where do you think you would go, huh, Isaac? Where were you planning on going?” you sneer because his plan is so simple-minded, so stupid, but Isaac has never been bright, so this is hardly a surprise to you. “You have no where to run to. No one wants you. No one is going to take you in.”

You vaguely wonder where you went wrong as a parent, to raise someone like Isaac. So worthless, contributing nothing— not to conversation, not to society. A child who failed his remedial classes and couldn’t make it as a third stringer on the lacrosse team in his freshmen year.

He even _looks_ like a loser. He burrows himself into clothes that don’t fit, that hang off his thin shoulders like formless sacks. He only trims his curls when they interfere with his line of vision, and every movement he makes is jerky, like he’s always scared of something.

Not a brave bone in that boy’s body.

“Here.” You hold out the backpack, and you’re amazed that he’s smart enough to realize a fake peace offering when he sees one. “Take it.” He stares, and the moment you see the flicker of doubt in his eyes, the moment he raises a quivering hand to take the pack, you hurl it hard at him. “You ungrateful piece of _shit_!” you bellow— because you grew tired of matching his quiet years ago. He doesn’t listen to reason. “You stupid, fucking _worthless_ piece of shit! _How **dare** you_! After everything I have done for you, you’re going to pull a stunt like this?!”

You’re almost proud of his audacity, that he’s finally made a decision in his life without you forcing him to choose, but you’re so infuriated that any hint of pride fades away as he shrinks in the corner, crouching low to the ground and covering his head with his arms.

Part of your heart flickers with fear and anxiety. While you and Isaac butt heads, you cannot imagine living your life without him. After all you have done to make him into a better man, you do not want to picture that work going to waste. Left to his own devices, Isaac would revert into the sniveling mess he was— irresponsible, indecisive, constantly terrified.

And you love him. You don’t want to see him go.

(Not him too.)

“You know what— you’re coming with me.” You grab his arm with all the strength you can muster, and you kick aside his destroyed plans as you storm through the home.

“Wh-where are we going?” he begs for an answer, twisting his arm awkwardly in your tight grasp. “Dad, where are you taking me?”

When you kick open the basement door with a bang, he digs his heels into the ground, balking.

“Why are we going down there?” His voice cracks and tremors. “What’s down there?”

You pull as hard as you can, and he stumbles after you down the stairs, trying in vain to yank himself in the opposite direction, babbling nonsensical apologies and pleas all the while. At the bottom of the stairs, you release your hold on his arm, and he back away, wringing his wrists, making no move to leave though.

“What are you doing?”

“Teaching you… a lesson,” you mutter while surveying the wall above your work bench. Your eyes fall upon an old metal chain, and you smile as you take it in your hands. It is sturdy, thick, and it will do just fine.

“What does that mean?” Isaac asks.

“It means—” You stride over to the freezer and flip the lid open with a dull _bang_. A cloud of dust rises up, and the padlock rattles against the porcelain. “Get in.”

“What?”

“Get in the damn freezer, Isaac.”

“Please no.” His eyes are wide as a child’s, and he’s stumbling backwards towards the stairs. As you chase after, he screams, begs, starts bawling, “Please don’t! No! I’m sorry! Dad, I’m so sorry! Please! Please don’t do this to me! I didn’t mean to! I’m _sorry_!” He tries scrambling out of your grasp, and dragging him is like lugging an unwilling animal into a cage. He lurches, and you pull. It’s a struggle until you have him by the throat and push him against the freezer until his back bends impossibly far backwards.

“Get in.”

“ _No, no, no, no **please**_!” he bawls as you shove hard and start lowering the lid. He keeps trying to jump out, leaping towards you until you curl your hand into a strong fist and beat him in. The lid slams shut with a bang, and you throw the chains over it, securing it despite the difficulty of Isaac wildly rattling around inside, screaming at the top of his lungs and thrashing, banging at the lid before you are able to padlock it into place.

“You’re not leaving me, Isaac,” you quietly tell the howling mess inside the freezer.

 


End file.
